Beauty
I went with Michelle to hear Noe Venable perform at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. It was a wonderful concert and Noe actually managed to improve on her earlier performances of "Juniper", which I hadn't imagined could be possible.
She performed some of her traditional favorites, but also quite a lot of new material, including a song that asks us to "say a prayer for beauty". I hope all this will be recorded in a new album.
It had started to rain by the time I left, and I was worried about the people sleeping outside City Hall. (The evening news said they were planning to stay there all night, even if it rained. It was raining.)
I ran into the nearest pizza parlor to the Downtown Berkeley BART station -- at least the nearest one open after midnight on a Sunday -- and asked for an extra-large cheese pizza. They prepared it in record time, and I caught the last BART train of the evening with about five minutes to spare. I chatted with a couple of people on the train and then got off at Civic Center with the pizza.
It wasn't hard to find the line. Despite the fairly heavy rain at 1:00 in the morning, over 100 people were camping out under a forest of umbrellas, tents, sleeping bags, garbage bags, tarps, and other makeshift shelters. (The Chronicle says well over 130 couples had lined up on Sunday night before the rain started. I'm not sure whether that number grew or shrank with the change in the weather.) They could be seen easily all the way across Civic Center Plaza.
I made my way to the front of the line and started working backwards from there, holding out the pizza box to everyone who was still awake. (Actually, only about a tenth of the people in line were asleep, whether because of the excitement or the rain or the cold. A lot of people were holding umbrellas in their hands, which was not exactly conducive to dozing off.) Most people said that they had already had pizza about half an hour before -- apparently someone else had just come through with the same idea. Still, there were exactly enough hungry people that I gave away the last slice to someone at the very end of the line (a young woman from Santa Cruz, if I remember correctly).
The sight of the encampment around City Hall in the rain was astonishingly gorgeous. You might think that people would be suffering and miserable. But most of them seemed merely tired and elated -- you might say glowing, or radiant. Part of it was the fact that the various kinds of shelter that had been cobbled together formed a sort of rainbow to match the rainbow-flag sleeping bag or rainbow-flag jersey in which someone had appeared fast asleep. It was especially amazing to see a few women who appeared to be in their seventies willingly sleeping under crude shelters in the rain in the hope of making it inside.
With my pizza gone, I caught a cab home and got in a little after 2:00 in the morning. Michelle had given me an emergency rain poncho as I left, and just before getting into the cab I managed to pass the poncho along to someone who had been wearing a torn garbage bag.
When I got home, I read various material that were coming out about the situation, and I decided that I had to go to try to warm people up in the morning. (The rain got stronger around 3:00 as I was heading to bed.) I set my alarm for 8:00 in the hope of bringing the people in line some breakfast. Since I had Monday off for President's Day, I thought I could spend the morning at City Hall and then catch up on sleep in the afternoon. The first part of that plan worked out pretty well.
I ultimately made it to City Hall for the third time around 9:30 in the morning with some bagels and coffee from Noah's Bagels in a little pushcart. The cart turned out to be extremely important for many reasons. First, it inspired confidence in my bona fides. When I tried passing out bagels from a bag in my hands, people eyed me a little skeptically. When the bagels came from an official-looking cart, people even suspected that I had been sent by Noah's or some local community organization. Second, it caught the attention of other people passing out food and drink, causing one of them to fall in with me. (More on that below.) Third, it made it bearable to make two whole circuits around City Hall with what turned out to be an unexpectedly large amount of food. And fourth, it led to my being "deputized" to distribute even more items. Having the proper equipment goes a long way.
My first observation in the morning was that most of the people who had actually spent the entire night were already inside City Hall or on the steps by 9:30, even though City Hall wasn't officially supposed to open until 10:00. So those people (who had probably suffered the most discomfort during the night) were mainly out of reach. The next thing I discovered was that I had already missed my chance to be the first person to offer everyone breakfast -- by a long shot. As I walked the line and called out "Bagels! Coffee!", I saw people already eating bagels and sipping coffee. It was clear that people had been making the rounds since at least 8:30 and very likely much earlier than that.
The people in line looked different under the morning light than they had in the rain the night before. There had been something particularly beautiful about the couples holding hands in a rainstorm, deriving warmth from each other, standing up (sometimes literally) against the cold and darkness. The people waiting in the morning looked thrilled, but they were not keeping vigil. They were waiting in line to be processed by a government agency. So the peculiar beauty of the morning wait seemed to me to be the way that San Francisco welcomed everyone.
It took me about five minutes of cart-pushing to fall in with Heidi, a woman who told me she had been married the day before and was so grateful that she'd decided to come back from the East Bay and help out. It was a great help not to be alone, and Heidi had something I didn't: cream cheese!
So: "Coffee! Bagels! Cream cheese!".
As we worked our way through the line, we saw other people making their way around with coffee of their own (mostly Peet's and Starbucks in containers like the huge ones I'd gotten at Noah's). The cart was like a magnet for people who were carrying heavy food items in their hands. "Would you like to give out these muffins? I can just put them in your cart..."
"Coffee! Bagels! Muffins! Cream cheese!"
It developed that some people were trying to give Heidi money or asking her how much we were charging. So we had to make another change (one of the most successful):
"Free coffee! Bagels! Muffins! Cream cheese!"
Now someone approached us with a jug of apple juice and Heidi discovered that Noah's had packed away a couple of cartons of half-and-half cream. Our menu just kept on expanding. The apple juice was particularly good because so many couples had brought young children with them. And we also found some sugar and sweeteners (appropriately enough, Equal!) in among the food items that kept accumulating in the cart. Two more people passed by with big bags of bagels and added them in.
"Free coffee, bagels, muffins, cream cheese and cream: apple juice!"
Another person walked along with us with a separate jug of orange juice for a couple of minutes, but I was spared having to add the orange juice into the litany because we got separated again. However, I discovered that one of the bags of bagels also contained bialies.
"Free coffee, bagels, muffins, cream cheese and cream: or a bialy. Apply juice!"
By this point Heidi and I were turning the second corner. We had started on the Polk Street side of City Hall and gone around the corner onto Grove, and now we turned right again onto Van Ness. The line continued all the way down Van Ness until the corner of Van Ness and McAllister, which is exactly what the news stories were referring to when they reported that the line "stretched around three city blocks", etc. It was true. Around the corner and around the corner again and down to the next corner.
I tried to ask Heidi a little more about her family but kept interrupting myself with the need to call out "Free coffee, bagels, muffins, cream cheese and cream: apple juice!" or reaching into the cart to pull out one of the containers of coffee. (It's a shame that I hadn't thought to say "May I have a large container of coffee?" when I called up Noah's first thing in the morning. The reason it's a shame is that that's a famous mnemonic for pi and I have never actually managed to use a famous mnemonic for pi for a practical business purpose before. Oh well.)
Because of all the interruptions, we were all the way to McAllister and Larkin before Heidi found out that I was straight. We had a few moments to chat before we reached the main entrance again and started our way through the line. By this time we had given out all the food Heidi and I had brought, but the cart was still full. Someone had supplied dozens of onion bagels. I hope newlyweds like onion bagels. How many people, if asked to predict what they would eat on their wedding days, would say "I guess some guy is going to hand me an onion bagel out of a pushcart and his friend is going to apply a little cream cheese?"
As I said, we were definitely not the only people working the crowd. Just as City Hall was officially opening, a group of little girls appeared with a large container of flowers and started to offer flowers -- tulips, I think -- to the people waiting in line. Most people eagerly accepted them; in their rush to City Hall, they generally hadn't had any time to order wedding flowers! We also saw people distributing biscotti (!) and chocolate hearts, and I read later on that there were even dry socks being passed out for the benefit of people who had spent the night on line. (I wanted to bring some dry socks myself, but I didn't really have a way to get to a sock store before City Hall opened.)
I don't remember how many times we went through the line, but I do know I got into the "Free coffee, bagels, cream cheese..." (the last muffin went around half way through the Van Ness block) chant well enough that I hardly had to think about it. I also know that we ran out of food after about two hours, so that must have been shortly before noon. Still, food continued to be distributed. Another group had a much nicer cart -- a really professional restaurant or hotel serving cart, with much more coffee than my cart could have held, and an even better assortment of food. I think they arrived a little later and they were still up and about shortly after noon.
Heidi and I said goodbye, and then I went around to the main entrance of City Hall and watched people coming out with their marriage licenses. It was raining -- it had been raining on and off this whole time, and I was hiding inside a big blue rain poncho -- but a really significant crowd had gathered to cheer people on. And someone was giving out plastic sleeves to hold the marriage licenses so that people could safely show them to the crowd on emerging from City Hall in the rain.
The crowd cheered loudly every time a couple came through the door, and one pair of very well-dressed men had a traditional cloud of rice thrown at them as they kissed under the "City Hall" sign. (I overheard who one of them was, and it developed that he was a fairly well-known local figure.)
Someone passed me a "We All Deserve the Freedom to Marry" sign. I made a final circuit of the building carrying that sign (and pushing my cart, which now carried only a mostly-empty Noah's coffee container that someone had already refilled once from a big Thermos). Someone had given an identical sign to the statute of Abraham Lincoln that sits to one side of the City Hall entrance.
The rain started again, and a strong wind blew, but it didn't seem to scare off the sort of reception line. As I walked across Polk Street toward the BART station, a gust of wind toppled a satellite dish from the CNN truck in Civic Center Plaza (one of perhaps five television trucks in the area).
Just before that, I'd seen a woman, just married, toss a bouquet of flowers into the crowd.
Riana came by City Hall on Sunday and took some pictures of the whole scene, which she's posted along with the story of her trip. I have no pictures of my own, but I did get caught on camera a couple of times -- sniffling and probably somewhat disheveled in my poncho. (I won't appear in any of Riana's pictures because she was there about ten hours before I was.)
Anyway, beauty!
